1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a device for serial data transmission over a fiber optic cable, and more particularly, to a digital circuit for converting parallel electrical data into serial optical data for transmission over a fiber optic cable and a digital circuit for converting the serial optical data back to parallel electrical data.
2. Discussion of the Related Art
In high speed digital circuits, data is typically routed between different circuit components in a parallel format in order to reduce the clock rate necessary to effectively transmit the data. When transmitting the data between separate digital circuits or processing units, it is known in the art to use fiber optic links to transmit the data, and thus, realize higher speeds at reasonable costs in the transmission of the data. However, fiber optic data transmission generally requires serial data transmission formats in order to reduce the number of optical cables necessary to transmit the data. Consequently, it is known in the art to incorporate flexible high speed multiplexing schemes to convert high speed parallel data formats into even higher speed serial formats to enable the data to be transmitted along a single or reduced number of fiber optic cables.
As the sophistication of advanced digital processing systems continues to increase, high performance data distribution methods must be developed to meet the requirements of data transmission between multiple processing units. Most of the current data distribution schemes mentioned above are inadequate to support many of the existing data formats, and further, cannot easily expand to meet the demands of future systems. More particularly, these prior art data distribution methods are limited in the ability to transmit data at different rates and word sizes in a practical circuit implementation. Consequently, the ability to transmit serial data at high speeds along a fiber optic cable is limited by the prior art methods of data distribution.
What is needed then is a device for converting parallel data to serial data for fiber optic transmission and back to parallel data again which is highly flexible in that the data can be transmitted at different rates and word sizes. It this therefore an object of the present invention to provide such a device.